


The Crown and the Candle

by middlemarch



Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV), All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness, Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Daemons, F/M, Forbidden Love, Witches, or maybe not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28149957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Even he had not thought to contravene the proscriptions. The Congregation was power and unity and life. Until it was maybe not.
Relationships: Diana Bishop/Matthew Clairmont, Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5
Collections: Mercy Street Crossover Advent Silver and AU





	The Crown and the Candle

The thing was, Jedediah generally liked being a daemon. Liking it wasn’t required, God knows his mother had told him that often enough during her myriad scoldings that constituted the majority of his childhood, the rest spent trying to gin up some invention in the old barn, but he’d only ever listened to her with one ear, something which have never eluded her notice. He liked the sense of energy that he carried within him, the vivid dreams, the elan that allowed him to bend the world around him. To him. He could have any woman he wanted—and he did. Any man too, though he was less likely to avail himself. He was the life of every party, the bon vivant, the one with the ideas, a prince among men, even if he never wore a crown atop his unruly curls. If it meant he was sometimes prone to darkness, to see shadows where the normals could not, to perceive what they refused and to be left alone with it, if it meant he found his kin rarely and usually when they were already dead, he accepted it, because to be himself was a gift even if he was the only one to grasp what that meant. 

It was only after he met the witch that he experienced…regret. He’d known as soon as he’d seen her moving through the halls, as soon as he heard her murmuring an incantation under her breath. There was a spell in the way she moved her wrist, in the frisson of the atoms around her, making way for their mistress. There was something she did with numbers that even a creature like himself could not understand, except that it was grave and exquisite and because she was herself in every way, oddly virtuous in a realm where virtue would not have seemed to pertain. He wanted her, not for her power or in spite of it, only that it was within her as much as her soul and he desired communion with that most ardently. He would have tortured himself over it, tried to pretend it was an unrequited love when he spoke of her to solemn Henry, that she was only a woman whose interest he could not pique, not the other half of him walking about, stitching the rent world together, weaving what she could not repair; he would have suffered, as a daemon who fell in love with a witch must do.

And then he heard a rumor. Of Matthew Clairmont and a scholar with hair like a lit candle. Of a lost book and rising water and how it was possible to find refuge. It was a rumor, but he’d never known a rumor to be without some kernel, the first leaf curled in miniature, the truth in hiding, ready to bloom. It was hope and it was terrifying because he’d been taught to be hopeless. To only ask questions he knew the answers to. He drained the flask he kept in his glovebox before he got out of the car, knowing she would smell the spirits on his breath when he spoke, when she opened the door to his knock. Her dark eyes would be regarding him steadily, untroubled by the trouble he brought to her. To them.

“Mary, have you ever heard of Diana Bishop?”

**Author's Note:**

> For once, I made up the title myself!


End file.
